Any Hope Of American Equality Died In The 1980s (And Here's Proof)

That growing divide between the rich and you? It's not just in your mind, and it's certainly not just a couple years in the making.

Actually, the average incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans have grown steadily over the last century or so, especially when compared to the flat-lining incomes for the bottom 90 percent of Americans. But as you can see in the above chart, it wasn't until the 1980s that the rich really started to pull away from the normals.

We created the chart using the World Income Database, a collection of data compiled by a group of economists who focus on the incomes of the rich, poor and middle-class. The chart plots the average income of the top 1 percent of American earners against the average income for the bottom 90 percent of Americans between 1913 and 2012, using real 2012 dollars.

In 2012, the top 1 percent took home more than $1 million on average, while the average income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans was $30,438. Compare that to 1917, when the top 1 percent's average income was just under $300,000 and the bottom 90 percent took home slightly more than $11,000 on average.

1. Tax Cuts For The Rich: Many of the spikes in the chart correspond with periods when the government slashed taxes on the rich. As the Center for American Progress notes, Ronald Reagan’s early 1980s tax reforms helped to increase income inequality.

The same thing happened in the late 1990s when Bill Clinton passed a tax cut on capital gains, or investment income, which rich people are more likely to have than ordinary Americans. And then it happenedagain when George W. Bush cut the top marginal tax rates in 2001 and 2003.

3. The Wages Of Regular Workers Haven't Kept Up With Productivity: In the 1960s workers and their families used to be able to live above the poverty line on a minimum wage income. But now, that’s no longer the case, according to EPI. In fact, if the minimum wage had kept up with boosts in worker productivity over the past several decades it would be $18.30, according to EPI. That's more than double the current minimum wage of $7.25.